How do I delete Electrum wallets

[BTC4meplease]

I can create wallets no problem, but I have yet to find a way to delete them.

And I can not find the wallets as a file anywhere on the computer?

Thanks in advance for any and all help!

[HI-TEC99]

The following instructions should work for the installed version of electrum, but not for the portable version. The installable version of electrum puts the wallet files in a folder that's hidden by default in windows.

If you have a windows start button on your version of windows then click it, then copy and paste the line of text below into the search box. Afterwards press the "enter" key on your keyboard and the folder containing your electrum wallets should open.

%appdata%\Electrum\wallets

This is what the search box should look like after you paste the line of text into it.



Once your wallet folder has opened you can use secure delete software to delete your wallets if you want to make sure nobody can ever undelete them with special software. Do your own research to find some good software that can securely delete files by overwriting them with random data.

Never install anything recommended on bitcointalk before scanning it for viruses using this site, and doing some research on the software yourself first.

[ranochigo]

Electrum has default data directories. The default directory for Windows is %appdata%/Electrum. Your wallet files will be stored in %appdata%/wallets. Although I don't really recommend it, you can go to %appdata%/Electrum/Wallets and delete the wallet file.

[pinkpajama99]

How do you do this on a Macbook? I have several extra wallets when I didn't know what i was doing.  Just confuse me.

[kolloh]

How do you do this on a Macbook? I have several extra wallets when I didn't know what i was doing.  Just confuse me.

http://docs.electrum.org/en/latest/faq.html#where-is-my-wallet-file-located

Yeah, as this article says they are in the .electrum folder in your home directory. This is a hidden folder so depending on your settings, it might not sure in Finder but you can always use the terminal to browse to this directory.

[Rinaze]

Is there a reason why the Electrum software itself is not supporting the deletion of an wallet?

[Coin-Keeper]

Is there a reason why the Electrum software itself is not supporting the deletion of an wallet?

" Sigh... why delete a wallet instead of moving it aside and keeping the old copy just in case?  You should never delete a wallet."
        -- Satoshi Nakamoto, Oct 2010


  (ref: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1327.msg15136#msg15136)

Except that now 7 years later malware and hackers have risen to new levels.  Nowadays folks may realize that they don't want ANY wallet on an online computer where the private keys are there (including those concealed by encryption of the wallet such as on Electrum).  I have not only deleted wallets but I have forensically deleted them from all online computers.  I DO leave watching only wallets on them because as you likely know those are comprised of MPK generated addresses only, with no private keys to present a security risk.  So my systems reflect hardware wallets with watching only wallets online.  Safe.  Plus I like not being confused by scores of wallets I don't even use anymore.  To each his own I guess on this issue.